Tech journalists have been lapping up a report by analysis firm KGI Securities that confidently predicts Apple will unveil a Stylus for its iPad in the second quarter of this year. It would be quite a change of philosophy for Apple whose entire empire is now built on screens you jab your finger at, so you would have thought KGI had some pretty explosive evidence upon which to base their prophecy. But no, it turns out Apple has filed some patents for stylus type devices over the last few years.

As every Apple geek knows, the Cupertino giant patents anything remotely related to their products – they even have a patent for sensors that will tell your iPhone when your shoes wear out. It’s become a rule at Apple to be prepared to fight a patent war with anyone after they got stung for $100m by Creative who claimed the first iPod infringing its patents. And Steve Jobs did have quite strong feeling on styluses:

Edelman has published its annual “trust barometer”, sampling a massive 27,000 people on how they rate politicians, industries and organisations on honesty. The stand out figure is the huge drop in trust for leftist activists disguised as do-gooders: NGOs. In the last year trust in NGOs has plummeted from 67% to 51%, falling below business in the honesty stakes.

Why? The survey found “an excessive focus on money and NGOs losing touch with the UK are the main causes for those losing trust in NGOs”. The report concludes that “the UK is drifting in the ‘trust doldrums’… NGOs are the worst hit”…

According to the Misery Index, the answer is yes. This is officially the least miserable we have been since Guido started recording the nation’s unhappiness before the last election. The fall in inflation today, as well as a slightly lower Public Sector Net Cash Requirement this month, means there is a clear downward trend in misery levels and that we are happier today than we have been in five years.

No wonder Miliband this week proposed a different index to measure the nation’s well-being…

Labour’s new poster out tonight is as deliberately misleading as the Tory effort earlier this week. What do the OBR say about Osborne’s spending plans? In 2020 public spending will fall to 35% of GDP, “below the previous post-war lows reached in 1957-58 and 1999-00 to what would probably be its lowest level in 80 years”. So as a proportion of GDP spending falls to 1930s levels, but in actual day-to-day real terms the OBR says: “by 2019-20 day-to-day spending on public services would be at its lowest level since 2002-03 in real terms“. Five more months of this to go…

Guido has in the past reflected on the accuracy of Danny Blanchflower’s economic forecasting. How have his more recent forecasts of doom and gloom fared?

“Pay is going nowhere,”said the sage of Dartmouth last month, warning“we won’t see real wage growth until 2016 at the earliest”. Dopey Danny was following up on his June prediction that there is “little likelihood of real wage growth rising in the months ahead”. He also made the same warning in May: “I wish the MPC good luck with their forecast that real wages are set to rise in the second half of 2014″.

The Electoral Commission today reveals how much each party spent on their European election campaigns. The big bucks splashed by the Tories and UKIP meant they paid six figures for each seat won. Labour got best value for money, spending just over a million quid for their 20 seats, or just over £50,000 per MEP.

Labour and UKIP types talking down the Green Surge should beware today’s YouGov/Sun poll. For the first time the Greens are two points clear of the LibDems, with Natalie Bennett’s party hotting up to 8% and Nick Clegg’s melting away to 6%. As you can see from the full numbers in Guido’s tracker, the Greens’ poll rating is rising faster than the anthropogenic concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere…

Fascinating analysis on ConHome showing how Labour’s poll ratings six months out from elections have historically compared with the final election result. Guido’s graph above illustrates how “Labour consistently end up winning fewer votes in the general election than the […]

The YouGov website does not include the Green Party in their voting intentions graphs, so Guido has decided to give them their deserved billing. Once again the Greens are in fourth today, knocking the LibDems down into fifth. As you […]

How many relaunches is that now? Ed Miliband’s big speech on the economy today is being tipped by sympathetic quarters of the press as showing Labour are serious about reducing the deficit, so at least there’s no chance he will […]

Yesterday was another orgy of “bash the rich” political populism. Once again, as the above chart from the Treasury shows, the most productive people were punished the most by the Chancellor. This is because he thinks it is good politics. […]

Quote of the Day

“I read more bloggers now than mainstream columnists, because they’ve got more interesting things to say. Too many columnists today make you think, ‘Yeah, I think you’ve said that 10 times before and I’ve just noticed your column has not go a single fact in it’”.